Increasingly, stores, malls, amusement parks, tourist areas, sporting arenas are becoming very large and geographically dispersed. The small mom and pop stores are dying breeds. This is especially true with the advent of Walmart and the desire of enterprises to compete on the same scale as Walmart. Consequently, most stores sell a huge variety of goods and services to customers and want customers to come to those stores for all their purchasing needs.
Stores or enterprises are regularly attempting to reduce expenses while improving customer relations. One area where a customer's experience with an enterprise is improving is via wireless information transfer between the enterprises and their customers and wireless transactions between the enterprises and the customers.
It is not uncommon for stores to provide wireless networks where customers communicate with the stores via portable devices of the customers, such as via cell phones. Enterprises can provide coupons, store information, and even sell items such as tickets to events and the like. As an added bonus, many enterprises provide wireless connectivity to customers for access to the Internet while on the premises of the enterprises.
Existing wireless technologies are fraught with bandwidth limitations that can limit what services an enterprise can reasonably provide to their customers. Most existing wireless networks within enterprises are limited to transfer rates at 54 Mbs (megabits per second) or less. At these rates, transferring large files or streaming video is a real challenge.